Museums in London: a small guide

As everybody knows, many museums in London are free: tourists don’t have to pay the ticket. Here you can see the most important ones, those that made the history of the city.

Let’s start with The British Museum, the largest and richest museum in the world. It was founded in 1753 and it contains one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities and, of course, the British National Library. Inside there are the Egyptian Galleries, which contain human and animal mummies, as well as the Rosetta Stone, which made the decipherment of hieroglyphic texts possible. Some parts of the Parthenon in Athens are in the Greek section.

In the Manuscript section there is the original copy of the Magna Charta, many famous books and some of the original manuscripts of the Beatles’ songs.

The National Gallery stands on the north side of Trafalgar Square, and it is usually visited before going to Buckingham Palace, hoping to have a chance to see the queen. The Gallery contains a collection of paintings from the 13th century to 21st century.

The Tate Gallery used to be a branch of the National Gallery, but in 1955 it became an independent institution. This happened because the whole museum would be huge, and tourists would had to spend too much time in there. It contains famous paintings by Turner, Blake, Hogarth and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Madame Tussaud’s is an exhibition of hundreds of life-size wax models of famous people of the past and the present. The collection was started by Madame Tussaud, a French modeller in wax, in the 18th century. Here you can meet all your favourite actors, writers, musicians, politics and so on. Since this museum is not an historical one, you have to pay the entrance ticket, which is not that cheap, actually.